Along with recent spread of computers, materials used in the office are created by an application program such as a wordprocessor or spreadsheet software installed in a computer. Generally, data (to be referred to as application data hereinafter) created by the application program is printed by a printer. To distribute the printed material as a distribution material, the printed material is copied by a necessary number, and the copies are distributed at a meeting or the like.
Distributed materials are bound and physically saved by a binder or the like, or digitally managed by an electronic filing apparatus.
In some cases, application data are managed by a common file server or database software to share information.
A material is often distributed by copying a material which is printed first. Also, a distributed material is often copied and redistributed.
When a distributed material as a printed material is repetitively copied, the image quality of an image serving as the contents of the distributed material degrades, resulting in a poor image. Especially when a color original is distributed, it is copied in monochrome at a very low image quality in most cases because a color copying machine is expensive and is not popular.
In this situation, there is proposed a technique of registering image data in a storage device such as a HDD (Hard Disk Drive), adding a document ID in printing the image data, searching for the registered image data again on the basis of the printed document ID, and outputting the image data (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 10-308868).
When image data is registered, like Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 10-308868, the data can be printed or FAX-transmitted without any problem. However, it becomes difficult to process image data in subsequent reuse or correct part of the image data.
In order to avoid this problem, the present applicant has proposed a technique of managing, in a database, application data and image data obtained by rasterizing the application data. Application data or corresponding image data is selected in accordance with the intended use, and printed or transmitted.
When both application data and corresponding image data are managed in the database in association with each other, and one of the data undergoes editing operation such as deletion, composition with another application data or image data, insertion of another application data or image data, or the like, the contents of the originally managed application data and those of the corresponding image data may not coincide with each other.
If the user who does not know that the contents of the application data and corresponding image data managed in the database do not coincide with each other selects and prints or transmits one of the data, data of contents not intended by the user may be printed or transmitted, impairing operability.